The Transfiguration and the Veiling of the Divine Glory

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The readings for the Second Sunday of Lent are about hope. In the first reading, the Lord gives Abram (Abraham) hope that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars of the sky, and that he will be the father of a great nation. In the Second Reading, Paul reminds us of the hope that the Lord will transform our bodies to be conformed to the body of his glory, by his power. And the gospel reading is an unveiling of Christ’s glory. Peter, James and John see Christ in all his splendor, his human nature permeated by the glory of the divine nature. It’s very hard to imagine what that experience was like for them, but they describe it as ‘kalon’, beautiful: “It is beautiful for us to be here”. 

This event is important because it is easy to lose hope, and if we lose hope, we have lost faith, and by faith we mean trust in Christ, in his promise of salvation, his promise of sharing in his everlasting glory. Peter, James, and John were given this experience to strengthen them for what is to come, namely the suffering and death of Christ. But if the glory of God the Son was unveiled at the transfiguration, it means that he was veiled beforehand. And this is what Paul says in Philippians: 

Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.

The key word here is “empty” (ekenosen). He emptied himself of the glory that he had as the only Son of God the Father. He took the form of a slave; the Greek word is doulou: servant, slave, from which the French word for sorrow or pain is derived: douleur. He became a man of suffering servitude. Paul continues:

He was known to be of human estate, and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross!

So his glory was hidden. He was unknown, unrecognized, as we read in the gospel of John: 

He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.

The glory of his divinity was hidden under the veil of his humanity. Hence, he was rejected. And this is what it means to live our life in Christ. He invites us to become like him, to share in his hidden life, to be hidden as well. 

The glory that is in you is the glory of his love (the Holy Spirit). The more that charity burns in you, the less you will be understood in this life. The reason is that we only really understand what has a likeness to ourselves, and most people are not like this God, who is Love and chooses servitude. So if you are a person of great charity, the very heart of your personhood will be veiled and you will suffer the pain of not being understood by most people, and there can be a certain loneliness in that. And because your love is great, your suffering will be that much greater as you behold the suffering around you, which increases your sorrow (douleur). Injustice bothers you more than it does others. Your lot (kleros) is to share in that hiddenness of Christ and the pain that goes with it. There is tremendous glory in that, but it is hidden, like his. 

But Christ says in Luke that there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known (12, 2). Given that the glory of his love is in you and growing, slowly transforming you into his image, that glory will one day be revealed. You will be transfigured. But today, very few people will truly know and understand you. This hiddenness is something that we have to learn to love. St. Silouan the Athonite writes: “When the soul sees the Lord, how meek and humble He is, then she [the soul] is thoroughly humbled, and desires nothing so much as the humility of Christ. And however long the soul may live on earth, she will always desire and seek this humility which passes all understanding.” 

Now the converse is also true. There are people in this world who seek their own glory, people whose predominant desire is to be known, admired, or barring that, feared. They love power and the glory of authority and having others fawn all over them; such people have an aversion to servitude. And so wherever there are positions of authority, such people will aspire after them, or aspire to be associated with those who have them. This is not to suggest that everyone in a position of power grasped after that authority; some are gifted leaders who would rather not have authority. One of the greatest popes in the history of the Church was Gregory the Great, a brilliant administrator and at the same time a great contemplative and pastoral genius–a rare and unusual combination. He was a monk, the first pope to have come from a monastic background. In the late 6th century, he wrote The Book of Pastoral Rule, a work that should be read by all who hold Church office. It is remarkable how well he understood human psychology, in particular the psychology of those who aspire after positions of authority and who abuse power, either by excess or neglect. As an example, consider the following:  

It is common that a ruler, from the very fact of his being set over others, is puffed up with elation, and while all things serve his need, while his commands are quickly executed according to his desire, while all his subjects extol with praises what he has done well, but have no authority to speak against what he has done poorly, and while they commonly praise what they should have reproved, his mind, seduced by what is offered in abundance from his subordinates, is lifted above itself; and, while outwardly surrounded by unbounded favour, he loses his inward sense of truth, and, forgetful of himself, he scatters himself on the voices of others, and believes himself to be as they say he is, rather than such as he ought inwardly to have judged himself to be. He looks down on those who are under him, nor does he acknowledge them as his equals; … he esteems himself wiser than all whom he excels in power. He establishes himself, in his own mind, on a lofty eminence, and, though bound together in the same condition of nature with others, he disdains to regard others from the same level.

What is interesting here is that the emptiness and small heartedness of such authority figures is veiled by the trappings of power and pomp, the complete inverse of the genuine follower of Christ, whose interior is rich with the glory of the divine love, but hidden behind the veil of the ordinary. And that’s why we are so often wrong in our judgments of others; we judge on the basis of appearances and forget that not everything is as it appears. As Pope Francis once said, we put clerics on pedestals, but they are only human beings, and if they relish the pedestal and in time fall off, we become terribly disillusioned, which can lead us to turn our backs on the Church indefinitely. But Peter, the first pope, did not lose sight of his own humanness and radical equality with others, for when he entered the house of Cornelius, he fell at Peter’s feet and paid him homage. Peter, however, raised him up, saying, “Get up. I myself am also a human being.” Unfortunately, history is filled with examples of human beings doing quite the opposite of what we see in the kenosis of God the Son. Instead of emptying themselves of the desire for glory and settling for a difficult life of hidden servitude, they relish elevation and cover themselves with trappings of glory and expect to be addressed by lofty titles. Our task, however, is to decrease so that Christ may increase, that is, increase within us, that his image may expand within us, that the love of God and neighbour may increasingly take possession of us, all under the appearance of the ordinary, like the Eucharist, which is the risen Christ under the appearance of an ordinary and unexciting piece of bread.